Shop lighting

Starting to build my new shop in the next two weeks or so. Its an addition to my existing garage which is 540 sq. ft. The new addition is 26’ wide and 58’ long, the roof is constructed with scissor trusses which gives me a vaulted ceiling inside which is around 13’ high. I used my old shop with inadequate lighting and always seemed to be working in the shadows, not a very safe thing to do. My question is what the best lighting for a shop?

11 replies so far

Not to be smart, but as much as you can afford. In my 24×30’ metal-built shop I have 6x double-8ft with 75w bulbs PLUS 3×300w Halogens and I still wish I had more lighting. I have 9-12ft ceilings. IMO, you can never have too much lighting.

I was fortunate when I bought my house it had a second attached garage 24×44 and that has twelve ceiling mounted ceramic light fixtures with incandescent bulbs mounted to the bottom of the roof trusses. The neat thing is that 1) each fixture has a hanging on/off pull chain AND 2) a three prong grounded socket. I replaced the incandescent bulbs with the new type fluorescent compact bulbs then hung”el cheapo” plain jane four foot shop lights wherever I needed them. The lights are on 2 separate circuits so I only turn on the section that I need for the work I am doing. I just hung an additional two shop lights in the only dark corner I had.

Lighting and my tablesaw are probably the only things I actually did right when setting up shop. I am a contractor, and often come across decent size demolition jobs of industrial/commercial buildings. Welll, one day we were doing demo on an old Halliburton lab and they had tons of great fixtures that were just going to get trashed, so I ran up there on saturday and nabbed 8 of them. They each hold four T12 tube lights. I put two up for my brother in law in his garage and have five of the other six stuffed on the ceiling of my 200 SF shop. I bought the “natural light” spectrum bulbs and am very happy with them. I am never short on light, and in fact my lighting may be overkill. But, because I had a free opportunity, I went ahead and and did it. Couldn’t be happier with my lighting. It is definitely one of those times where just biting the bullet in the beginning saves you lots of heartache in the end. Sort of like keeping tools sharp, buying good saw blades, checking things for square, etc…

In my shop 16’x24’ I went with two 20’ rows of double 4’ t8 tubes. I used the 6500k tubes. I have excellent light. I will still need some task lighting at certain tools ie scrollsaw etc. That is just the nature of the beast.The t8 flourescents are probably the most cost effective and efficient lights availabe right now. The t5 flourescents areprobably more efficient and with your ceiling height would probably work without the glare from lower ceilings but they are quite a bit more expensive than the t8’s. LED’s are an emerging light source but again while extremely efficient they are still expensive. Halogens put out a lot of light but also put out a lot of heat there goes the efficiency.

I am glad Bruce brought up bulb temperature. I had forgotten to mention it, though it really is an important consideration, beyond your normal ”I need to be able to see to work” requirements.

Case in point—I had the dickens of a time trying to stain match the doors and top splash of our 1912 sideboard/bar when recreating missing components. I struggled with this for over 2-weeks on a daily basis, and I just could not get the colors to match as closely as I wanted. I stripped, remixed, and re-applied countless times. I eventually got close, but noticeably OFF, gave up and brought the piece into the house anyway.

Guess what?... POOF! The problems with color matching went away and colors matched perfectly. WHY… as it turns out all of my house lighting is CFB, however I purposely chose to temperature match our old incandescent bulbs (2,700K), you know… the yellow cast of what used to be “normal.” My shop is full of 8ft fluorescent bulbs that have a temperature of 4,200K. There lies the difference.

In other words, our old world yellow incandescent bulbs hide many sins. You should take this into consideration when choosing your lighting schema for your shop. I had added 900w of Halogens (3,000K) to the shop trying to balance the shop ‘spectrum’ but it was not enough. I would suggest adding a corner of the shop well lit in ~2,700K lighting (even if it is secondary lighting) in order to color-check the finishing of your projects. IMO, having the higher temp bulbs on when color-checking the finish still pollutes/changes what the project will look like in your house. Of course this assumes your house lighting is NOT predominantly 4,200K fluorescent.